Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (43 page)

By refusing to back down in the face of Gandhi’s tactics, the Raj may have regained a limited amount of prestige after the setbacks of earlier years. The Bengal famine of 1943–4, however, offered a further severe blow to its moral authority. In addition to the loss of rice imports from Burma, an existing shortfall in agricultural production had been worsened by a major cyclone in Bengal in October 1942. Nonetheless, a classic, Nobel Prize-winning analysis of the causes of famine argues that in this instance there was no actual shortage of food; wartime inflation combined with mismanagement by the authorities triggered unnecessary hoarding.
¹⁰
At a broader level, according to this reasoning, India’s lack of democracy at the time can be blamed on the fact that, without the need to win elections, its British rulers lacked the incentive to avert catastrophe. More recent work has argued that war conditions did lead to a genuine shortage and that tales of hoarding (retailed by the authorities at the time in order to justify their refusal to divert food to India) were illusory.
¹¹
Nevertheless, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that maladministration made the consequences worse than they need have been, and that Churchill’s own reaction was grossly inept and, it is tempting to add, callous.

Administrative and political problems within the Bengal government exacerbated a situation already made worse by severe transport difficulties and the loss of supplies from Japanese-occupied Burma.
¹²
In the face of the famine, the British authorities were appallingly slow to act. Even after Amery woke up to the seriousness of the problem he struggled to convince the War Cabinet to allocate extra shipping and supplies. Churchill ‘spoke scathingly of India’s economic inefficiency which made it necessary to supply it with food which otherwise might not be needed’ and offered unhelpful comments about ‘Indians breeding like rabbits’.
¹³
Lord Wavell, the new Viceroy, faced the problem with the requisite seriousness, but struggled terribly to get the backing he needed. He told Amery in February 1944, when arguing for more imports: ‘I warn His Majesty’s Government with all seriousness that if they refuse our demands they are risking a catastrophe of far greater dimensions than [the] Bengal famine [. . .] They must either trust the opinion of the man they have appointed to advise them on Indian affairs or replace him.’
¹⁴
Even this veiled threat of resignation did not get him the help he wanted. His figures were questioned by Churchill’s scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, ‘that old menace and fraud’, as the Viceroy called him. ‘The fact is that the P.M. has calculated his war plans without any consideration at all of India’s needs’, Wavell protested. ‘I am afraid that he may be courting a first-class disaster to the Empire, unless we are very lucky.’
¹⁵
It was not until that April that, in Amery’s words, ‘Winston was at last seriously perturbed and convinced that something would have to be done.’
¹⁶
Fortunately, although the government’s eventual response was extremely belated, a further season of famine was avoided.

Wavell’s willingness to confront London on this crucial issue was proof of his fitness for the job. He had not been Churchill’s first choice. A career soldier, he had been Commander in the Middle East (1939–41) and then India, and was promoted to field marshal at the start of 1943. The Prime Minister blamed him, probably unfairly, for the failure of the Arakan offensive into Burma at the end of 1942. Many other names had been canvassed for the succession to Linlithgow including Attlee, Eden, and Amery (who, not uncharacteristically, had suggested himself).
¹⁷
Churchill, indeed, quickly came to regret his choice. During the months he spent in England before taking up his post, Wavell made it clear that he was not content to be a do-nothing viceroy, but wanted authority to pursue constitutional advance with India’s political leaders. He secured this in vague general terms. Churchill reluctantly provided him with a set of instructions which was ‘mostly meaningless, e.g. it exhorted me to get on with the war, to improve the lot of the Indian, to make peace between Moslem and Hindu, and indicated right at the end that political progress during the war was not barred’. Having read it, Amery told Wavell that ‘you are wafted to India on a wave of hot air’.
¹⁸

Many observers felt that the mere mention of India brought out a streak of unpleasantness or even irrationality in Churchill. In March 1943 R. A. Butler, the Education minister, visited him at Chequers. The Prime Minister ‘launched into a most terrible attack on the “baboos”, saying that they were gross dirty and corrupt’. He even declared that he wanted the British to leave India, and – this was a more serious remark – that he supported the principle of Pakistan. When Butler argued that the Raj had always stood for Indian unity, Churchill replied, ‘Well, if our poor troops have to be kept in a sweltering, syphilitic climate for the sake of your precious unity, I’d rather see them have a good civil war.’ At this, Clementine protested that he didn’t mean what he was saying, and Churchill admitted this was true: ‘but when I see my opponents glaring at me, I always have to draw them out by exaggerated statements’.
¹⁹
Such a technique was all very well when he was dealing with subordinates, but it was risky and counterproductive when he employed it on representatives of foreign powers. Not long after his encounter with Butler, he had a meeting with Roosevelt’s personal representative William Phillips, who had visited the subcontinent on the President’s behalf. Phillips suggested to Churchill that the time was ripe to promote discussions between Gandhi and Jinnah. Phillips recalled:

Churchill was annoyed, and annoyed with me; that was clear. He got up and walked rapidly back and forth. ‘My answer to you is: Take India if that is what you want! Take it by all means! But I warn you that if I open the door a crack there will be the greatest blood-bath in all history. Mark my words,’ he concluded, shaking a finger at me, ‘I prophesied the present war, and I prophesy the blood-bath.’

Phillips was ‘puzzled’, not to say astonished. ‘Never had I mentioned the sudden withdrawal of British power and yet he insisted upon assuming that that was my proposal. It was only too clear that he had a complex about India from which he would not and could not be shaken.’
²⁰
Meanwhile, Churchill could take little comfort from the tides of opinion in India. In December 1943 Jinnah urged the British to ‘divide and quit’. ‘Mr Churchill said he did not preside over the British Government to liquidate the Empire’, he observed. ‘But voluntary liquidation is more honourable than a compulsory one, and the British Empire will be liquidated one day.’
²¹

One factor that increased Churchill’s resentment towards India was the issue of the sterling balances. These were British debts chalked up in London in exchange for goods and services required for the war effort. These grew, in total, from £1,299 million in December 1941 to £3,355 million in June 1945, of which around one-third was owed to India.
²²
From one perspective, this was very good news for the UK. She was, in effect, extracting an enormous forced loan which she was unlikely to have to repay in the near future. (One German propaganda leaflet aimed at Indian troops portrayed Churchill escaping the bombing of London with a wagon containing India’s riches.)
²³
From Churchill’s perspective, however, Britain was accumulating vast obligations towards India in exchange for the privilege of protecting her against Japan. ‘Are we to incur hundreds of millions of debt for defending India in order to be kicked out by the Indians afterwards?’ he would demand of Amery. ‘This may be an ill-contrived world but not so ill-contrived as all that.’
²⁴
At one stage he came up with the idea of announcing publicly that Britain would make some kind of counter-claim against India. ‘It may be honourable or necessary to bilk your cabby when you get to the station, but I cannot see how it helps telling him through the window that you mean to bilk him when you get there’, noted the long-suffering Secretary of State, who knew both that India was massively impoverished and also that the current system was essential in order to maintain the flow of her goods and men.
²⁵
When Wavell was present during one of these diatribes, Amery passed him a note saying that Churchill ‘knows as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American Colonies’. Wavell’s contribution to the discussion was to point out that, during the first two years of the war, Indian soldiers had defended Britain in the Middle East rather than Britain defending India.
²⁶

Churchill was, of course, right to be anxious about Britain’s financial position, which was a matter of diplomacy and of home politics as well as of economics. The American government was determined to extract, as the price of their help, commitments to a new global order in finance and trade. Open, multilateral trade and payments regimes, they believed, would safeguard against the restrictionism and slump that had bedevilled the interwar years. In particular, they wished to do away with Britain’s imperial preference system, opposition to which was personified by Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. In early 1942 the details of the Mutual Aid Agreement were finalized. Article VII committed Britain, as quid pro quo for Lend-Lease, to ‘the elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce, and to the reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers’.
²⁷
However, the British only agreed to this after the President wrote to Churchill stating explicitly that his government was not asking for ‘a commitment in advance that Empire preference will be abolished’.
²⁸
Churchill had made it clear that, although he himself ‘did not believe that preferences served any useful purpose’ and was prepared to negotiate for their abolition, he objected to any appearance ‘that Empire ties would be bartered away or sold in exchange for goods which Britain needed to wage war’.
²⁹
The effect was that, although the British were now pledged to future trade talks, they would not have to get rid of preferences unless the Americans cut their own tariffs to a satisfactory extent. All this, moreover, was highly important from the point of view of Churchill’s domestic political position.

For, in dealing with these topics, he faced a balancing act. Most Labour ministers favoured cooperation with the USA’s liberalizing agenda, as did some key Tory figures such as Eden and John Anderson. However, Amery, Lord Beaverbrook and others maintained the dream of economic self-reliance within the Empire and viewed Hull’s free-trade obsession with hostility. They were also sceptical of the other aspect of the reform plans, negotiated jointly by Harry Dexter White of the US Treasury and, on the British side, John Maynard Keynes. This was the proposed International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Bank that were eventually agreed at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. Opponents attacked the Fund (which involved fixing exchange rates) as a return to the gold standard. This was a canard, but it was a point about which Churchill, given his record as Chancellor, may well have been sensitive. When ministers discussed the plans a few months before Bretton Woods, there was chaos. Labour minister Hugh Dalton recorded that many present, including Churchill, had not read the relevant report: ‘the Beaver begins to shout headlines, “It is a gold fund”, “The Bank says it is the gold standard”, “We are giving up our economic empire” ’ and so forth. The meeting descended into pandemonium with several ministers shouting at once. The question was urgent because civil servants needed instructions for their talks with Dominion officials. Churchill, though, said the Cabinet should not be hustled ‘just because a few officials from the Dominions are here; they can be entertained for a few days, and given drinks, and taken round to see the bomb craters’.
³⁰

The episode raises the question of whether Churchill really understood the issues at stake, which (in comparison to the tariff debates of the Edwardian era) were often highly technical. Amery, unsurprisingly, liked to suggest that he did not, and Churchill certainly did not follow all the twists and turns of the argument.
³¹
Keynes, on the other hand, felt that when Churchill did make an effort he could be ‘quite magnificent’ and capable of ‘thoroughly understanding the points at issue’.
³²
Perhaps what is most important is that, even if Churchill’s attitude to the Atlanticist economic agenda at times seemed defensive and almost negative, he never intervened decisively against it. For, as the war drew on, he was increasingly appreciative of the fact that Britain was ‘broke’, and knew perfectly well that future US help would be conditional on pledges of economic good behaviour in the international sphere.
³³
Unlike Amery and Beaverbrook, though, he did not think that responding to American pressure on these issues compromised the future of the Empire. For him – as in the pre-1914 era – an open global economy was compatible with a healthy British imperialism. Efforts by Americans in this direction therefore did not offend him in the same way that their interventions on India did.